No one could ever figure Sharpe out because he was rangy and crafty and his face looked amiss with conniverey...but he had a way of being likeable in spite of the inhibition...he had a tireless personality that always asked questions of you, made you feel as if things were really about you when in truth Dean was just steering you around to a subject for which he could get something out of you or lay something upon you...and this must’ve come from his old man, a big tyrannical BOSS like the mirrored devil of Cool Hand Luke...we were all afraid of him…staying over at the house and he’d be up on the roof at six a.m. working unbelievably and then by seven we’d be up due to his gravity and man if he didn’t put us all to work in the yard, this big green Kentucky yard with landscaping and knolls, the very sight of peace and there was none to be found within it...that’s what got me, was the appearance of order, the discipline of right action, but little love, of which I was used to, but love in work, no grace, no wisdom from all this effort...just dull suffering and warped red-haired children of Ruth’s bitter corn...maybe they had some kind of love or bond going that I couldn’t see from my glints but it didn’t matter so much now that we were older and the old man had mellowed some...still always engaged in some great project…A strange big-handed red-faced lug of a guy, and like Dean, you just sort of had to like him a little bit cause he had some cut of endearment, some moments of cordiality...a heart it seems. Anyway, the folks had made neighborly contact with my mother and this was how I knew that Dean and his older brother Kurt were due to arrive for Xmas...of course I saw him at Fido’s half-drunk and half-mad with teenage reverie—and of course he waited only five minutes to enlust me as his “co-pilot” to capture some young vacationers…it was an adventure, a game, a need he had to satiate and I was game…so the Sharpe brothers had driven their dad’s fishing boat, knowing that a barge had dropped thousands of cases of Belikan beer into the harbor near Belize City and they had rummaged two or three sandy cases and were considering going diving for more…that was until Dean had ferreted out two college girls with a set of parents en route to Mata Chica, the Toney up-island resort…
So Dean had his Theory of Art, ahem, wrong book, had his eyes his sights set on the 20 year old college girls from the south—our odyssey—a madness. And rear admiral, Kurt, that is we called him “Rear” for being the “Admiral” of the two Sharpes, had his wife of a couple years with him and she was sweet and fun and the both of them lived vicarious-like through Dean as “Rear” had for most of his life…I got the telephone call from the compound later that night informing me that Dean and Kurt would be along tomorrow morning in their dad’s boat to pick me up and take me up island after getting some petrol and Belikan at the Texaco—
-Michael Price
